by Tim Stevens
Purkiss had jammed the gun he’d taken from Kuznetsov into his belt. He felt for it now, treading water, and got hold of the grip. It was too late, the man’s finger was already bearing down on the trigger. At such close range he couldn’t miss.
The man’s face burst outwards, so unexpectedly that it took Purkiss an instant to realise he had to duck, head beneath the water again, because the man had been shot from behind by something high-velocity and his entire face had become an exit wound. When it sounded safe he lifted his face to the air again. The bull-necked man had rolled off the piece of hull, his head trailing a bloody slick.
Beyond him, Kendrick sprawled belly-down on his own makeshift raft of hull, looking absurdly like an armed body boarder..
‘Told you,’ he called. ‘These Soviet guns. Reliable as hell in all weather.’
Purkiss turned his head, feeling groggy with the movement. A short distance behind Kendrick, also buoyed by a scrap of debris, was Elle, hair plastered across her white face. He wanted to swim over to them – they were fifty feet away, no more – but suddenly he lacked the strength.
In the far distance, towards the shore, sound was rising. Purkiss thought he could see airborne shapes through the smoke and the gloom.
All he could do was tread water and call across one word: ‘Done.’
‘Better be,’ Kendrick answered. ‘Ammo’s out.’
Because of the ringing in his ears from the cacophony of the last half hour, Purkiss didn’t hear the engine until the speed boat was up close, and he turned and saw the keel hurtling across the water straight at his head.
Forty-One
From his position circling a couple of hundred metres away, the Jacobin had cursed, out loud, at the ineptitude of the man on the boat. Instead of striking the engines or the cockpit, the grenade from his launcher had blasted off the Black Hawk’s tail rotor. The damage would ultimately prove fatal, but it would be a slow death, and Purkiss would have time to abort the strike as long as the controls remained intact. Seconds later, the explosion in the distance confirmed the Jacobin’s fears. He couldn’t see it, but the hiss of water that followed it meant that the target had been missed.
When it became clear the chopper was going to land on the boat, the Jacobin had taken evasive action, speeding further out across the sea. By the time he’d circled back, he’d begun to believe Purkiss hadn’t made it out alive. But there he was, head dwarfed by the bobbing debris, and there were his friends, too.
The Jacobin felt no disappointment, only emptiness. That, and a professional’s urge to salvage what was possible from the situation, always with the future in mind. To clean up. On the horizon the cavalry was stirring, an awe-inspiring flotilla by the sound of it. It meant he had to work quickly.
*
With no time to turn and dive, Purkiss shoved his hands upwards against the water, the movement pushing him down. He ducked his head at the same time, resisting the urge to keep his eyes lifted to the arrowing point of the advancing keel. Once down as far as he could go he tipped on to his back to avoid the deadly churning of the propellors. He recoiled as they chewed the water inches from his face.
By the time he opened his eyes the hull had almost disappeared. He remained submerged, fire in his chest. In a moment he saw the dark shape loom into view again, turning for another pass.
He timed his move precisely so that he was rising to emerge on the side of the hull just as it passed overhead, before it could pick up enough speed to elude his grasp. His hands shot out of the water before his head did and he caught two fingers in a steel ring on the side, some sort of anchor for rigging. Although he felt as though his fingers were being wrenched out of their sockets he hung on, used his grip as a brace to swing his other hand up. He seized the rim of the boat, launched himself out of the water like a gymnast on a bar, and dropped hard into the boat. He was on his haunches, shuddering with the effort and above all the unimaginable cold.
Purkiss rose to stand, thigh muscles screaming, and faced the boat’s skipper. Then he gave in and let himself drop into a sitting position, because he wasn’t prepared for this. It was too much on top of everything else.
The cliché left his mouth like a breath.
‘It’s you.’
The Jacobin pressed home the advantage then, his surprise cancelled out by Purkiss’s own. As Purkiss dropped his hand to the gun tucked in his belt, the Jacobin kicked out sideways. His shoe caught Purkiss high in the chest. Purkiss rocked back on his haunches.
The Jacobin let go of the wheel and moved in with feet flailing, a berserker’s fury driving him, but even so he knew he was weakening and so did Purkiss, who was himself sapped. The Jacobin used gravity to aid him, dropping on to Purkiss with an elbow aimed at his throat. Purkiss rolled and took it on the shoulder, stood and brought a knee into the Jacobin’s chest – just there – and his scream of pain was barely a wheeze. He rolled in turn and started to rise. Purkiss aimed a kick at his face which would have sent him overboard with his skull shattered, but the Jacobin was skilled in countering this particular move. He slapped the foot aside and caught the ankle and flipped it upwards. Purkiss lost his balance, landed heavily on the floor of the boat, hitting his head.
The Jacobin brought a foot up for the killing stamp onto Purkiss’s exposed neck. Purkiss swiped the Jacobin’s leg out from under him and it was his turn to land hard. Purkiss had slid to the other end of the boat and had the gun out.
And it was over.
‘You should have let them put the chest drain in. You’d be in better shape.’
Purkiss’s words sounded to him thick. Before his eyes swam two men, two boats.
‘I did.’ Between words Rossiter gave a little start, like a hiccup. He sat against the wheel of the now-drifting boat, both hands pressed against the left side of his chest. Much as Purkiss had seen him in the flat, after the stabbing.
‘I had the drain, gave it half an hour. Then got them to remove it and discharged myself.’
‘Because you had my friend, Abby, stowed away.’
‘In the boot of my car, yes.’
A beat passed. Purkiss felt a flare of panic. Had he passed out for a while? But to the south, the mass of approaching traffic had advanced only slightly.
So many questions. ‘Where’s Teague?’
‘Dead, in the bathroom in my flat.’
‘He was on to you.’
‘Yes.’ He broke off, gasping, his voice softer afterwards. ‘I surprised him in my flat, as I told you. But he was there looking for incriminating evidence.’
‘You’ve failed.’
‘I have.’
Purkiss didn’t ask the obvious question. Why did you do it? He found he didn’t care. Gingerly, to stop his vision blurring further, he craned round. The speed boat had covered more distance than he’d realised. Kendrick and Elle were specks in the water.
Rossiter said something. Purkiss said, ‘What?’ partly because he’d only half heard, partly because he had difficulty believing what he had heard.
‘You can’t take me in.’
‘You’re asking me to let you go.’
‘Of course not.’ He broke off, waxen, breath coming in hissing jerks between his teeth. ‘You have to kill me.’
Purkiss waited.
‘Kill me and dump me. Quickly.’
‘Why?’
‘The Service can’t be implicated in any of this.’
Purkiss coughed a laugh. ‘Bit late for that.’
‘It doesn’t have to be. Work with Elle, come up with a narrative. It was all Kuznetsov’s doing. The Service wasn’t involved at all.’
‘The Service wasn’t involved. You’re not Service. You’re a traitor.’
‘It won’t be seen that way.’ Despite the pain in his voice he was managing to put urgency in it. ‘The Service will be tainted. It’ll damage our standing. Weaken us irrevocably.’
‘Our. Us.’ Purkiss shook his head. ‘You really are something else, Rossiter.’
> ‘Kill me.’
‘No.’
‘You’d like to.’
‘More than anything else.’
Another beat. Then Rossiter said, ‘I can make you.’
The first of the helicopters had arrived and were circling above the carnage like crows over roadkill, the gusts from their rotors ruffling the water. Without being asked, Rossiter had reached across from where he was slumped and given the engine some throttle to move the boat further away.
‘Claire – your Claire – was mine.’
For a moment Purkiss misunderstood, thought he was hearing soap opera dialogue.
‘Best agent I ever had. Bright, ruthless, utterly loyal. A master of subterfuge.’
Purkiss listened, the gun weighing down his hand.
‘You know what I’m getting at, don’t you.’ Rossiter seemed to grin, but it was a grimace as he shifted position. ‘She was the one who carried out the hit on the Iranian, Asgari. She told you she was investigating Fallon. Other way round. He was investigating her.’
Rossiter’s voice was dwindling, the rushing blood in Purkiss’s temples drowning it out.
‘I was running her. Recruited her a couple of years after she joined the Service. She had passion, she had commitment. As you well know, John.’
One of the helicopters was taking an interest in them now that others had joined the scene. The crackle of radio static cut the air.
‘Fallon was on to her, but he wasn’t sure of my identity. Knew there was someone running her, of course, and I was on his list to be investigated. But there were several others, and he began with the people he was certain of. Claire was one of them.’
Purkiss hadn’t checked the magazine, wasn’t sure how many bullets were left. Focus on that, focus on anything but what he’s saying.
‘She loved you, John. Thought you’d be an ideal recruit, wanted to approach you eventually, open up to you about what we were doing. I agreed with her. You’d have done us proud. But for now, I advised her to keep her activities from you. It was her idea, a masterstroke, to make you believe Fallon was the one needing investigation. It got you on her side against him, allowed her to gain the benefit of your skills.’
He was remembering what Fallon had said, in the basement.
‘Fallon was searching your flat that night when she came home and surprised him. She was a fighter, John, you know that. He did what he had to.’
Fallon had said, and Purkiss had thought he was quibbling self-exculpatingly over semantics, that he’d killed her but not murdered her.
‘It was self defence. She could well have killed him that night.’
A searchlight cut through the haze of slatey smoke, pinning them. Purkiss stood, the boat rocking even as it stayed stationary. He raised the gun.
‘It isn’t true. None of it.’
‘But it is true.’
‘No it isn’t. But this is for suggesting it is,’ said Purkiss.
He fired twice, three times.
Forty-Two
He leaned on the rail, watching a freighter lumber its way through the black water. To the left the river curved away from the bleak Essex marshes towards the sea.
The tang of cigarette smoke was what he noticed first. He didn’t turn, not even when he was joined at the rail a few feet to his right. For once Vale had let him choose the meeting place. Purkiss didn’t know why he’d decided on this spot. Claire had liked the Thames. Perhaps that was it.
They stood in silence for a minute, the raw October wind coming down the estuary off the North Sea, bringing with it creaking gulls and the stench of decomposing fish. Vale lit another cigarette and pitched the match into the reeds. Purkiss watched it stick headlong in the mud.
‘You’ll have worked it out, I imagine.’ Had Vale’s voice become coarser since he’d last heard it? He glanced across and yes, the man appeared to have aged, though it was barely two weeks since he’d last seen him.
‘Fallon was your man all along. From before he killed Claire.’
Vale took a long drag, spoke on the exhale. ‘He was my first agent, the first one I ran after leaving the Service. The original Ratcatcher, if you will. I’d set him on the trail of whomever it was that was co-ordinating the hits on Asgari the Iranian and others. He discovered Claire was involved. Obviously she wasn’t the ringleader.’
‘And he agreed to take the fall for Claire’s death, accept a murder conviction, to keep his cover intact. With the promise that he’d be out in a few years.’
‘Correct. We had credible intelligence that the Jacobin was operating in Tallinn –’
‘The Jacobin?’
Vale waved his cigarette hand. ‘Fallon’s nickname for the ringleader, Rossiter as it turned out. You know what a French Revolution buff Fallon was. Burke’s Reflections and all that.’ He drew on the butt again. ‘Rather apt, I suppose, “The Jacobin”. A fanatic, committed to the destruction of the enemy, blind to all else.’
‘Sounds like you had a fair amount of affection for Fallon.’
Vale sighed. ‘Yes, I did care for him. He was a brilliant agent, a brilliant man. You liked him as well, you must admit. Before... well, before.’
‘So after he went to gaol, you needed me as – what? Filler?’
‘Far from it. I needed a replacement for him. You were the best there was.’
‘And once he was out, I’d step back into the shadows?’
‘No.’ It was the first time Vale had raised his voice. ‘I couldn’t run you two as a team, naturally. But you’d be my agents, both superb, each with his own unique talents for particular situations.’
Purkiss watched the water fowl for a while.
‘Seppo and Fallon were sharing the flat in Tallinn.’
‘Yes. Seppo was mainly a backup man. Fallon knew the Jacobin was one of the three, Rossiter, Teague or Klavan. He penetrated Kuznetsov’s crew by getting in with that woman. Then he went missing. I couldn’t very well just send you in to rescue him. You’d never have gone. So I had to create the legend that Seppo had only recently spotted him in the city, that he’d been released from prison without my knowledge.’
‘And when I told you later I was refusing to pull out, broke off contact with you –’
‘I didn’t exactly tear myself apart trying to persuade you otherwise, no.’ Vale made a sound as dry as the leaves in his cigarette. ‘I must admit, I was worried you’d get suspicious then.’
Vale had moved quickly in the aftermath of the downing of the Black Hawk, working with the Embassy in Tallinn, securing the release of Purkiss and Elle and Kendrick. Purkiss himself had been patched up with fair speed. The other two spent several days in hospital with hypothermia before flying back to London. In the meantime, the remaining members of Kuznetsov’s crew had been identified and either apprehended or subjected to the sort of manhunt that was mounted by the security forces of a country the size of Estonia perhaps once in a generation. Christopher Teague’s body had been found in Rossiter’s bathtub, neck broken, hand still clasped around the paperknife he’d used to stab Rossiter.
Abby’s body had been flown home. Purkiss had wanted to speak to her distraught, bewildered parents in Bolton, but Vale had stopped him. The Official Secrets Act applied, and Purkiss had to remain in the shadows. He and Kendrick would attend her funeral, though, no doubt keeping back in the rain while the small crowd of family and friends stood bowed and shaking in the churchyard afterwards.
Purkiss spent more time with Vale in those first days than he had for months previously, yet they hadn’t talked properly before today. In his head Purkiss had played out today’s inevitable encounter in all the forms he could imagine it taking. He hadn’t been prepared for this, this bald stating of facts, this utter absence of affect.
Vale flicked another spent match, this one far enough to draw the momentary attention of a gull before it dropped into the water. ‘Think about what life would have been like if you’d known about Claire from the start. Think of the last four years. Bi
tterness, self-loathing at having been taken in by her… all the things you’re experiencing now. You wouldn’t have gained anything by finding out earlier. But you would have lost four years.’
Purkiss swallowed, and for a moment thought his throat would stay closed permanently. ‘So the more years of your life you spend wallowing in delusion, the better?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Vale. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know.’
They watched a cargo ship groan and blink its way down the river until it was out of sight. Purkiss said, ‘What’s happened to him?’
‘Rossiter? Yes, you have a right to know if anyone does.’ Vale rubbed his eye with the thumb of his cigarette hand. ‘It’s all very hush hush, no trial or anything. He’s kept his mouth shut, so far. Everything’s been tried, from the usual threats to an offer of full immunity.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Oh, of course. That was always going to be an option. And no, I don’t like it any more than you do. But in some ways it doesn’t matter because you know what drives him. He’d never accept something like that. No, my bet is we’ll never find out who else he was running, if there was anyone else. He’ll rot in a cell for the rest of his days.’
‘I’ve heard that before.’ Purkiss looked away.
‘You must have been tempted.’
In his mind’s eye Purkiss saw Rossiter cowering, injured chest forgotten as his hands came up to protect his face, the shots chipping and splintering the boat around him. When the shooting stopped he lowered his hands and looked at Purkiss. In his eyes was defeat, and acceptance.
Purkiss straightened, walked along the railing away from Vale. He saw movement below, and stopped.
From behind him Vale said: ‘So this is where you throw your badge and gun into the river.’
Down in the thicket of mud-smeared reeds something flopped wetly. A rodent of some sort.
